And this is the challenge for Google. If mobile users reliably go to Facebook daily, that is where people will want to advertise to them, if they are spending all of their time on their mobile rather than their laptop or desktop, then mobile advertising will be more important than advertising in the laptop/desktop space.
Doubtful. People go to search engines to buy things. People go to Facebook to hang out. FB ads are unlikely to supplant Google for that reason.
It doesn't matter whether an advertiser wants to advertise on a certain platform. If nobody clicks on the ad, then that advertising is useless. Maybe they just want to put their brand into the viewer's head rather than have the viewer click on the ad. That's a valid strategy, but not really what most advertisers pay for.
I agree with you, the insight is that the most common thing people do on laptops or desktops is 'search for something' if the most common thing people do on mobile is 'check my facebook' then that puts Facebook on mobile in the seat where Google sits on computers. I'm bummed I sold my FB stock when it hit 40.
I was also wondering this. Facebook has embedded widgets on perhaps more third party sites than any other platform. Does that mean that, while logged in, loading up Facebook comments on a blog post counts you as an active user? Loading an embedded Like button?
First of all, Facebook reported Q2 2014 results today, not first quarter. The OP is months old.
Secondly, what's with this new HN trend of people submitting quarterly financial results of publicly traded tech companies. It is usually not newsworthy outside of financial media.
That's because HN lives in an echo chamber of FB hate while 90%(close to a billion people) of FB users actually find it as an indispensably useful tool.
How do you generalize more than a billion people with "they"?
I think we're reaching the limits of the English language with that one. I'd say it's hard for an outsider to determine how the majority of a billion people view a particular product.
I'm sorry, but you generalized about the same billion people and even offered a completely imaginary 90% statistic to boot. And I'm not an outsider, not to the industry, not to web services, not to social networks, not to FB itself. I've been a user and an employee and a consultant for all of those things.
And what exactly do you think you mean by "I think we're reaching the limits of the English language with that one."? The semantic "limit" of the 3rd person plural pronoun is that there is an explicit or implicit, antecedent substantive referent. Your nonsense compounds itself.
"Indispensably useful" has positive connotations, yet most people I speak to (even outside the HN/tech crowd) do not speak of Facebook in positive terms.
Some use it simply because it's addictive. They don't want to use it, they don't enjoy using it, but they're eventually drawn back in after trying to quit. In this sense, it's "indispensably useful" in the way crack cocaine is indispensably useful.
(edit: as it turns out, these numbers are from the 1st quarter. Q2's show 1.07 billion mobile MAU: http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=861599)